Faculty Onboarding & Orientation
Overview
Our Program Strategy and Operations team was tasked with launching an online graduate program in Journalism Entrepreneurship. The launch of this program represented a novel approach to academic program management and departmental partnerships at our Division. As the Program Director, part of my role was to onboard incoming faculty to our program and course quality processes.
Responsibilities
- Instructional designer
- Canvas onboarding developer
- Project manager
- Program director
Stakeholders
- Department chair & graduate faculty
- Assistant dean
- Course quality manager
- Instructional design team
- Program coordinator
Approach
- Needs analysis:
- Consult with all stakeholders
- Review faculty needs assessment
- Instructure Canvas
- PowerPoint & Photoshop
Problem & Solution
With this program rollout, there was an opportunity to streamline marketing, student & faculty engagement, and other program administration processes. One of the top priorities was to help ensure course and program quality while working to launch academic online programs with transient schedules. In order to make this possible, it was imperative that all stakeholders were in agreement on roles & responsibilities and were committed to project milestones & timelines.
I partnered with all stakeholders to learn more about how our new approach would affect their teams and processes. I invited their input on how we could best align our efforts in order to integrate course quality into both our administrative, course design, and course evaluation processes to support faculty in creating engaging and rigorous online learning experiences to enhance the overall program outcomes. The partnership helped to forge buy-in and ownership of respective roles, responsibilities, and process adjustments toward those ends.
Discussions with incoming faculty revealed they needed information about several steps in the process of taking on their first online teaching assignment. Toward this end, and having learned from the needs assessment I completed earlier, I built a community site in Instructure Canvas for faculty to enroll in when they first learned about their teaching assignment.
I created graphics depicting the Course Development Cycle with information about milestone dates and course expectations, and organized information so it aligned with the Quality Matters course review process. The content also included essentials on the “why” of following the QM rubric by showing how its competencies ensure universal design access and a good user experience, while sufficiently challenging students with a substantive course structure and taxonomy.
Our Canvas instance provided page templates that I tailored using custom graphics designed in Photoshop and Powerpoint. The onboarding site was rolled out at an in-person/virtual kick-off meeting where faculty could access the platform and ask questions about the onboarding processes. This helped support a smooth rollout of our new online journalism program by ensuring that our courses were ready by the program launch date and were reviewed for alignment with the Quality Matters rubric.
